Pokemon GO players have had a whirlwind few days when it comes to the games six most famous missing Pokemon.

Having been mysteriously absent since the game launched, their was suddenly sightings of not just Ditto, but also two of the games Legendary bird Pokemon, in the form of Articuno and Moltres.

Articuno appeared first, sighted a couple of times in a gym in Franklin, Ohio, which was supposedly (so the story goes) gifted to the player as a sort of 'sorry' from the games developers Niantic for a bug that was brought to their attention by the player.

This was follower up yesterday when screenshots of another player suggesting that Moltres had also been captured.

However now Niantic have actually weighed into the situation to shed some light on whats going on.

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First Niantic Labs responded to a Geek.com reporter saying that they had never distributed any Pokemon to players.

They then said they were looking into these wild claims to discover what happened.

Niantic then followed up with IGN, telling the sit that they had "noticed" several Legendary Pokemon had gotten into players accounts when they shouldn't have.

According to Niantics updated statement last night, this had been fixed and the Legendary Pokemon revoked from the trainers' account.

"A few of our Legendary Pokémon had erroneously been granted to some Trainers," read a statement on the Pokemon Go official Facebook page.

"Thanks to the help of several of our Trainers, we were able to locate them and bring them home safely."

For now it remains unclear exactly how the Pokemon made it into the game without Niantics say so.

Though the idea that these were "gifted" to players seems to have been completely debunked by the developers.

Some players suggest that in one or both cases these players had found a way to manipulate the game and trick the servers into giving them the rarest of the rare Pokemon.

Others believe it might equally be a reoccurrence of a strange bug since the last update that (sometimes) results in a glitch where where you could catch a Pokémon, but it turns out being another one instead in your Pokedex.

For example, you could a Caterpie, but end up with a Charizard. We're not sure why, but it's been happening.

What's clear though is that these special legendary Pokemon certainly have a purpose and as fans of the game we'll all have to wait until Niantic finally decide to put these rare Pokemon into the game legitimately.